CBC Book Club And Other News

The Fruit Hunters is an October pick for the CBC Book Club. They are accepting questions until October 22, and then a Q&A will air on October 23.

C u on the airwaves!

***UPDATE! Here’s a prelim interview I did while cooking purple broccoli and anchovies (Oh Puglia) with the CBC’s Hannah Sung. And here’s the actual recording of the full interview. There’s even a part where we spoke about Borges’ library and how there’s a massive book with a certain word in it that happens to literally be God and everybody’s been looking for it for years…

While that search continues, other write-ups keep on tricklin’ in…

“Brilliant and eye-opening,” says the Telegraph in London, in their report about the Grapple. Let it be said, for the record, that Grapple inventor Gary Snyder reminded me of Baudelaire: when he spoke, “he was like the princess from the fairy tale who, from her half-open lips, pours out a flood of diamonds and precious stones.”

“Adam Gollner’s kind of great – I recommend his weird, wonderful book ‘The Fruit Hunters,‘” says Pulitzer-winning Los Angeles writer Jonathan Gold (aka God) in this interview (I must admit that without Gold’s writing I don’t think I coulda survived LA. Seriously.)

The New Agriculturalist notes the book’s “linguistic originality,” calling it “an amazing, and highly recommended debut: irreverent, informed and surprisingly hard to put down… It’s an act of homage to the myriad of little known fruits, and the people whose lives they touch, across far-flung parts of the planet.”

“He writes like a contemporary Dr. David Fairchild,” say the plant-freaks. “If they gave out a Pulitzer prize strictly for gardening books, Adam Leith Gollner would win it with this book!” And the Vice President of the Santa Cruz chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers Association calls the book “so right on the money about all the issues and, alas about the California Rare Fruit Growers too, we have way too many grouchy people.”

This is what the blogosphere has to say:
“Sometimes we chance upon a piece of writing so evocative, beautiful, rich and real, that we are transported into the experience of the writer… This book’s got it all – superb writing, sex, sensuality, history, agriculture, obsession, history, botany, mythology, and more fruits than we’ll encounter in a lifetime. Read this, and you’ll be yearning for exotica, culinary diversity, and noisy, foetid, fragrant marketplaces in lands-afar.”

As is this, and I must agree that as disconcerting as it is for those of us with nerves barely covered by flesh, there does seem to be a deeper meaning to the world than any of us could have ever hoped for – even though it will always remain out of reach: “Around the middle of the book I started obsessively reading chapters like some junkie mainlining heroin (which, by the way, is a product of the fruit of the opium poppy). I knew then I’d be giving this book a great review… The man has a way with words. Describing slugs eating coco-de-mer blossoms: “It’s like watching an educational film about venereal diseases in outer space.” Be forewarned that this fruit is not entirely work-safe. The further I got into the book, the greater my sense that somehow there’s a deeper meaning to the world than I’d ever hoped for. That has to be the rarest fruit of all. This is Adam Leith Gollner’s first book—I hope to see many more from him in future. For now, do yourselves a favour and read The Fruit Hunters.”

Passionate Foodie is more homeostatic about things, and calls it “an excellent read, one that will keep you interested from start to finish… an eclectic blend of plentiful and fascinating information deserving of my highest recommendation.”

Finally, here we are, you who have hacked your way this far through all that dense hype (geez, should I really be keeping track of all this stuff? But if I don’t, who will? The internet, I guess…) The last thing I want to mention is also the best. My talk at Cornell University was a lot of fun, and I’ll be posting footage of it to youtube as soon as I got a copy of the VHS. (!) After the lecture, I had the pleasure of spending a day in their magical garden (flowers that smell like chocolate???) and checking out Professor Howard E. Evans’ cabinet of curiosity in the animal veterinary department. (Dr. Evans is the author of Guide to the Dissection of the Dog. As one comment puts it, “DO NOT attempt to dissect a dog without this book!” I won’t). His incredible office was crammed with skeletons, snake fangs, cyclops sheep heads floating in formaldehyde, fetal sloths he’d found in its dead mother’s belly, and botanical anomalies of every sort. Intrepid Ithaca Times Arts Editor Natasha Pickowicz came along for the trip, and posted a Q and A here

Psychic soot…

Her article in the Ithaca Times traces the contours of unknowable territories here